Adam Weinstein

The Old Testament. It's been kinda important to much of human civilization going back a fair stretch. It's also a sham! Your cherished psalms and stories of ritualistic filicide are no longer any match for Israelis with radiocarbon dating equipment, sheeple!

Archaeologists from Israel's top university have used radiocarbon dating to pinpoint the arrival of domestic camels in the Middle East — and they say the science directly contradicts the Bible's version of events.

Camels are mentioned as pack animals in the biblical stories of Abraham, Joseph and Jacob, Old Testament stories that historians peg to between 2000 and 1500 BC. But Erez Ben-Yosef and Lidar Sapir-Hen of Tel Aviv University's Department of Archaeology and Near Eastern Cultures say camels weren't domesticated in Israel until centuries later, more like 900 BC.

"In addition to challenging the Bible's historicity, this anachronism is direct proof that the text was compiled well after the events it describes," reads a press release announcing the research.

Lay translation: The Old Testament was written down after men had camels as regular pack animals in the Middle East—centuries after the events in it are thought to have happened. Not just the creation and the Adam-Eve-serpent-Fall-of-Man thing: The whole story of the Israelites and whatnot.

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How do we know the dating of the camel bones is correct? You don't question an archaeologist like Erez Ben-Yosef, because come on, look at him:

That's him on the right.

Strictly speaking, this study is not incontrovertible evidence that the Bible's all sheer and utter bullflop—just that it's provided to us by guys scraping together a bunch of stories about their peoples of varying degrees of veracity and presenting it to the world as a single, sorta-coherent, sorta-linear text.

That reduces the likelihood that your story collectors are reliable, or honest, or knowledgeable. Kind of like modern-day literalist preachers. But hey, who knows for sure? He works in mysterious ways.